Seamus Heaney:
“The Country Bumpkin”


In the many works of author and poet laureate Seamus Heaney, his well-known texts are influenced by his life in the rural countryside in Northern Ireland. Through this, his poems often have several motifs in which he includes a complex language both vivid and grotesque that include images of foliage, fruit and blood both habitually occupying the same poem with each other. In one poem, Blackberry Picking, the morbid twist on a very joyous activity when the poet uses such grotesque language such as blood, flesh, skin, and rot. Later, the poem references the fictional character of Bluebeard and his lustful and murderous reputation with women. The author’s life experience in the farmlands references the conventions of berry picking in the field to take on a deeper meaning. In addition, the imagery and references Heaney employs in his writing occupying the customs and the agricultural life style that he witnessed in his early life living in a farmhouse. In result, Heaney’s writing is synonymous with the pastoral writing, wherein the urban way of life is mocked when juxtaposed with the rural counterparts in a sardonic manner.

The reflective times of Seamus Heaney depicts in his text, wherein it includes simple, countrified agricultural images that comes together with bodily imagery to that repeats through most of his writings that implies a pure and natural setting for his poems and short stories to complement his message through that piece. In addition, when he accomplishes this style of writing, the tone finds to be more earnest in the author’s message. However, by accomplishing this, he does not lose his ulterior purpose to the poem. His writings, which include such poems as Follower, Blackberry Picking and Requiem for the Croppies, are clear examples of his affection to his conventions that often echoes some influences from his cultural background that he exercises in his writing style as a result.
Heaney’s work has a strong connection towards his experiences in his hometown and the environment wherein he grew. Seamus Heaney was born in into a large, Catholic farming family in countryside of Castledawson in Northern Ireland in a family farmhouse called Mossbawn. Consequently, the family’s life revolved around the farm and it’s maintenance for the reason that it was the main source of their living and their lifework. During his life, while working as a farmhand assisting his father, he grows to respect the experience of his hard labor, next to his father. Through this experience of the responsibilities in his life of a farmer’s son, this exposure would emanate his fixation towards the agricultural images that he recognizes from hi s early life. To this outcome, his writings comprises of the agricultural language and imagery that relates to his rural farm.

Like most people, Heaney’s life and work often involved his connection with his native history and culture. In his case, his writings resonates the contact that his culture has had on him. His Catholic background has been present in most of his writing, which has allowed him to be exposed to the religious text that has had a spiritual effect on him a well as cultural effect on the author. Consequently, his religious background has allowed him to keep in touch with the text, which manifests itself in his writing in which he refers to importance of the use of such elaborate language in his poems. His employment of this intricate language works as an indicator of his imagery that gives depth to the images, which resembles religious imagery. In addition, his knowledge and experience of the history of his native Ireland as well as the events that was taking places during his time has had an effect on him as well to incite opinions from the writer. His criticism and observation often can label him a regional writer for his allusions of the environment wherein he lives. Heaney’s works seldom speaks of political or military subjects, but he references the small observations about the countryside or the simple details that goes beyond the ideas of government.

In most of Seamus Heaney’s work, he employs several allusions to his rural experiences in his writing that brings in rustic metaphors that interprets to mean anther thing. For instance, in the poem, Blackberry Picking, the occasion illustrates a joyous atmosphere when the readers assumes is an innocent event of picking berries. Heaney’s use of salient language constructs the vibrant tone of the poem that invokes clear and vivid imagery of the narrative. Heaney’s utilization of corporeal language wherein includes such vocabulary as lust, tongue, and flesh has the reader indicate a sensual quality that is a cross between a grim and corporeal tone. The ripe berries noted in the poem are clearly to be a allusion to how these berries possess a human quality, therefore the metaphor that the berries exemplifies the gloomy aspects of human lust for excess. Heaney’s purpose and language creates a different picture from the innocent description of day of berry picking by employing grotesque language in the first stanza to have a mixture of a violent imagery within the berry-picking occasion. Next, the second stanza shifts from the contented ambiance of delight towards a thwarted realization of their disintegrating joys that creates a melancholic shift to create a dramatic effect between a beautiful narrative, to a dismal, gory description in the first of reality’s tendency to raze dreams and banish all hopes of all humanity through their fault of excess.

The measure of corporeal and agricultural image motifs he uses in his poems progresses through his work. The focus in his poetry always remains on his allusions on the small observations he has whether they are of reflections of his distant past years as well as the times and periods long before him. One reader of his works also finds the images of blood rampant in his writings, wherein he uses it to intensify the purpose and picture of his imagery that parallels between the connotations of violence and death in his poetry. One example that uses these patterns is his early poem from 1966, Requiem for the Croppies, which is an elegy commemorating the thousands of Irish families that was massacred for their land by English armies in 1789, where their bodies were desecrated and given no burial. At the start his facility with history makes him familiar to his cultural background and his experience and that history effect on him. In addition, these allusions from his knowledge of history give the reader resonances of his past and his connection towards his native land. The poem itself shares the similarity to other poems when he regresses to the blood motif when the poem relapse to the grass being “soaked in their broken wave” a metonymy for the bloodshed one the ground as well as the symbol of barley on the that parallels the close interpretation of life and death, thus keeping to his rustic conventions as a regional writer towards his works. Additionally, both works mentioned here has the author’s constant use of the month of August. The term would share a noble and powerful connotation with the inclusion of Next, when the use of this meaning crosses with both settings and sparks several parallel between youth and virility.

In summary, Seamus Heaney’s background compensates for the overall success of his poetry and his style to be as earnest towards his writing and to